Traditionally typewriters or printers have used fabric ribbons which are wound from reel to reel. With golf-ball typewriters and more recently needle and daisy wheel printers and the like there has been a tendency to enclose the ribbon in a disposable cartridge or cassette. Such cassettes are injection moulded in a plastics material and have an inlet to and an outlet from an otherwise closed chamber in which an inked textile ribbon is stuffed in serpentine manner so that the chamber is tightly packed. Ribbon may be pulled out through the outlet of the chamber and may be returned into the chamber by means of a ribbon transport roller in the chamber adjacent to the inlet which bears upon either an idler roller or a pressure plate so as frictionally to engage ribbon travelling past it. A formation on an accessible portion of the transport roller (which is normally journalled in the upper and lower halves of the cassette) engages in a rotary drive member on the printhead or platform or the like so that the inked ribbon is advanced stepwise as the characters are printed. Guides may extend for the inlet and outlet (though not all cassettes have them) and the free ends of the inked ribbon are joined to form an endless loop.
The present practice is for the parts of the cassette to be made first and sold in pieces to a ribbon manufacturer. In accordance with existing practice such a manufacturer assembles the component parts, threads the inked ribbon through the body or pan of the cassette, and places the lid on and holds it in place while the internal cavity is being stuffed with inked ribbon, after which the lid is assembled to the body, e.g. by pin fixing. The free ends of the inked ribbon are then joined together, e.g. by ultrasonic butt welding. But this is a time-consuming operation because individual pieces of the cassette have to be unpacked, identified, assembled and the cassette threaded manually, then it has to be stuffed with ribbon, and finally the ribbon has to be butt welded. This is a labor-intensive process for the ribbon manufacturer who also has to invest in the necessary machinery. It is an object of the present invention to provide an unfilled cartridge system that is simpler from the standpoint of the ribbon manufacturer.